They lie about elections, too (and they get away with it)
Fox News is being forced to pay out nearly a billion bucks after settling a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over claims of the company’s conduct during the 2020 election. The headlines declare: “Fox pays $787 million for its 2020 election lies.” “Fox settles Dominion lawsuit for $787.5 million over US election lies.” “Fox News pays price over 2020 lies.” This language about “lies,” it feels very juvenile, quite honestly the sort of thing a child would say. I think that’s sort of the point: These outlets want to cast Fox News as infantile, childish, immature, so they are using infantile language to describe the network. Of course it kind of has the opposite effect: The headlines make the reporter, not the target, look like a little kid. Just change it up a bit and you’ll see: “Fox News pays price over 2020 booboos.” When you talk like that, you’re not making fun of Fox, you’re making fun of yourself. Any adult who talks like this sounds like a moron, I’m sorry.
I don’t really care what happens to Fox, a news channel that is effectively mainstream media with slightly angrier white people at its masthead. They fucked around and they found out. I wrote for a national news outlet during the heady weeks after the 2020 election, and there were in fact many interesting and important leads to follow regarding voting irregularities and malfeasance that year, but very few of them led anywhere even remotely compelling, and none of them, so far as I can recall, led to Dominion, a company which at its worst seemed beset by a low-grade sort of incompetence at managing a national election system. Fox wanted ratings and for some incomprehensible reason they wanted Rudy Giuliani and so they went for it and they lost big.
I am less concerned about Fox and more concerned about the fact that progressives lie about elections all the time and nothing ever happens to them. Do you remember how pretty much every Democrat and every major media outlet was whole-hog-in on the Trump/Russia “collusion” conspiracy theory? They were all just convinced that Trump and his people had, like, met with Russian intelligence operatives, and somehow conspired to—in some way—steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. It cannot be overstated how fully and comprehensively they believed this. It was all they ever talked about. I had progressive friends constantly convinced that the big exposé was always right around the corner, that we were always one House Intelligence press conference away from the smoking gun. It was just nonstop collusion conspiracy theorizing, all the time, ceaselessly, for like four years. And it worked: Even normal people started believing it. A 2019 Reuters poll found that nearly half of all Americans believed that “Trump worked with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” even after Robert Mueller “cleared Trump of that allegation." There was never any evidence to support that conspiracy theory, Robert Mueller even disabused of the notion of it, and still it didn’t matter. That’s how comprehensive the left’s election lies are: Belief in the lies persists even when the source of the belief begs you to stop believing it.
Nobody got fined for any of that. Nobody got fined for insisting for years that George Bush stole the 2000 election or whatever. Nobody got fined for casting doubt on the 2004 elections. Whenever a conservative wins they delegitimize it, somehow. It’s just par for the course. And yet there are never any sanctions of any kind, let alone 787 million of them.
Two explanations come to mind. The first is that the Left is just better at it. As I wrote last November, it’s ridiculous for conservatives to think that they can beat progressives and/or Democrats at the mail-in voting gambit. The Left is just better at that, they’ve built a system that works for them and we’re not going to beat them at that. Maybe they’re better with election falsehoods, too—they have the media, they have many of the courts, they have many of the necessary institutions, they can just say what they want and not worry about it.
The second explanation is that the Left actually believes their insane election conspiracy theories. That was Fox’s problem: They didn’t believe these claims about “voter irregularities.” Libel law generally dictates that the defendant knew a claim was false before publishing or disseminating it. Fox anchors knew these claims about “irregularities” were bogus, their private discussions confirmed as much, and that in the end is what dinged them at court. But if you genuinely believe the crazy things you’re spouting, then you’re much more protected from a defamation suit. I guess if the reporters at CNN and the New York Times and AP truly felt that Trump “colluded” with Russia to somehow steal the election, then they have a pretty big shield of immunity working in their favor: They espoused something insane and without any merit to it, but doggone it, they believed it. That matters.
They’ll lie about the next time a conservative wins. I would bet the mortgage money on it. And you can reasonably bet that they’ll honestly believe that, as well. It’s just part of the playbook now. If Fox’s mammoth loss demonstrates anything, it’s this: Don’t try and beat these people at their own game. They’re too good at it, you’re not good enough, and you will lose lots of money, and also you’ll lose elections too. Be better, and smarter, than this.